Stella Rimington - At Risk

And then suddenly the helicopter was gone, banking away westwards as if bored with the whole process.

“Now move,” said Faraj urgently, backing off her. “That won’t be the last of them, and this rain won’t last for ever.”

Relief flooded through her. At the roadblock, she heard several cars drive through in close succession. The policemen, she guessed, had been watching the helicopter. They moved forwards, bodies bent against the sheeting rain and the drag of the muddy water, and soon found themselves a couple of hundred yards beyond the roadblock.

“Another mile, and we’ll hit the village,” said Jean breathlessly, crouching down against the bank. “Trouble is, if anyone who’s just been through the roadblock sees us climbing up on to the road, they’ll just go straight back to the police and report us. They’ll have descriptions by now, and probably pictures.”

Faraj considered for a moment, took the binoculars from her, and narrowing his eyes scanned the surrounding countryside.

“Right,” he said eventually. “This is what we do.”

The repair hangar at the Swanley Heath Army Air Corps base was impressively vast, and considering its size, impressively warm. At 11 a.m. the Chief Constable of Norfolk had ordered that his deputy, Jim Dunstan, should take over what was now officially an anti-terrorist operation. Dunstan’s first act had been to request that the Swanley Heath base act as host to the inter-service operational team.

It was a good decision, thought Liz. Swanley Heath was halfway between Brancaster to the north and the Marwell, Mildenhall and Lakenheath USAF bases to the south. The operational team was now, hopefully, at the centre of the area through which their quarry was moving. The base was secure, and able to accommodate with ease both the two-dozen-odd personnel involved in the running of the operation and the considerable array of their technical and communications equipment.

By midday, after a scramble of activity and a lot of hard driving with sirens blaring and lights flashing, this was almost all set up. The fifteen-strong police team, headed by Dunstan, and with Don Whitten and Steve Goss in attendance, occupied an area dominated by a nine-metre-square electronic map of the region, borrowed from their Army hosts, showing the deployment of roadblocks, helicopters and search teams. In front of each member of the team was an assortment of laptop computers, landlines and mobiles, most of them in use. In the case of Don Whitten there was also an ashtray.

Beyond them, parked in a ready-to-go line, were the three unmarked Range Rovers of the Norfolk Constabulary’s SO19 Tactical Firearms Unit. Its nine members, all men, lounged on benches in their dark blue overalls and boots, passing round a copy of the Sun, rechecking their Glock 17 pistols and MP5 carbines, and staring blankly up at the distant roof of the hangar. From outside, at intervals, came the distant beat of rotors as Army Air Corps Gazelle and Lynx helicopters lifted away from the tarmac.

The official estimate, by default, was that the target of the two terrorists was either one of the USAF bases or the royal residence at Sandringham, where the Queen was now staying-as she did every Christmas. No one could quite envisage how the security net surrounding these establishments was supposed to be penetrated, but the worst had been assumed concerning the weaponry that the two were carrying. Neither chemical nor biological weapons had been ruled out. Nor, indeed, had a so-called “dirty” bomb, although the remains of the bungalow had shown no signs of radioactive material.

In his keenness to get the county’s two Squirrel helicopters launched and over the search area, Whitten had explained to Dunstan, he had sent them up without their thermal imaging activated. The helicopters had been scrambled from Norwich, but of the supposedly available system operators one was on compassionate leave and the other had broken his ankle in the course of a motivational weekend. So the Squirrels had gone up two-handed, with a pilot and a Night-Sun searchlight operator each. Visibility had been atrocious due to the rain, but the search area had been thoroughly covered with the help of the spotlights, and Whitten was confident that D’Aubigny and Mansoor were still confined to the seventy-mile square whose northern boundary was Brancaster Bay and whose western boundary was the Wash.

Liz was not so sure. Apart from their predilection for murder, the two hadn’t done too badly so far when it came to concealing themselves and moving across hostile terrain. The D’Aubigny woman clearly knew the lie of the land.

What was her connection with the area? Liz asked herself for the hundredth time. Why had she been chosen? Was it just because she was British, or did she have some specialised local knowledge? Investigations were checking every one of her known contacts, but the parents’ silence was desperately unhelpful. Couldn’t they see that there was only one chance of saving their daughter, and that was to catch her before it came to the final reckoning? Before it came to the killing time?

From the other side of the room she saw Don Whitten pointing in her direction. A neatly dressed young man in a green Barbour coat was walking towards the trestle table on which she had her own laptop set up. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’m told you can help me find Bruno Mackay.”

“And you are?”

He held out his hand. “Jamie Kersley, Captain, 22 SAS.”

She shook the proffered hand. “He’s due any time.”

“Are you from the Firm too?”

“I’m afraid not.”

He grinned warily. “Box, then?”

Short for Box 500, one of the Service’s former postal addresses, this was one of MI5’s many sobriquets. Traditionally, as Liz was keenly aware, the Army had always had a rather warmer relationship with MI6. As politely as she could, she ignored the question.

“Why don’t you take a seat, Captain Kersley? When Bruno Mackay shows up I’ll steer him in your direction.”

“Er… thanks. I’ve got two four-man teams unloading a Puma outside. Let me get them squared away and I’ll be back.”

She watched as he marched briskly away, and then turned to her laptop.

SAS here mob-handed, she typed out. But ITS target still unknown. Unusual, surely. Something I shd know???

Signing off with her identifying number, and encoding the message with a couple of swift key-strokes, she dispatched it to Wetherby.

The reply came back less than a minute later. Highlighting the text, she watched as the random-looking letters and numbers disappeared, to be replaced with legible text.

Agree unusual. Regiment present at request of G Fane. Essential ready deploy at short notice he told COBRA. Yr guess good as mine.

As she watched, the eight SAS soldiers passed the entrance to the hangar. Despite the rain, or perhaps because of it, they walked bare-headed and with studied casualness. They were dressed in black fireproof battledress and carrying a wide assortment of weapons including carbines and snipers’ rifles.

Altogether, a hellish volume of firepower was being brought to bear. Against what exactly? Liz wondered.

The pub in Birdhoe was called the Plough, and the sign showed the seven stars of that constellation. By 12:30 the car park was almost full; Sunday lunch at the Plough was a popular fixture, and there wasn’t another pub for three or four miles in either direction.

Exiting the ladies’ toilet in the corner of the car park, where she had been waiting until the coast was clear, Jean D’Aubigny looked about her. Luckily, it was still raining. No one was hanging around in the car park to chat. The car she had identified as the easiest to steal, if not necessarily the most suitable, was an old racing-green MGB. It was probably a quarter of a century old, but without being a collector’s piece looked reasonably well cared for. Its great advantage was that due to its age it had no steering lock that had to be disabled. Jean was capable of breaking a steering lock-a length of piping braced beneath one of the struts of the wheel and forced downwards usually did the trick-but it was a hard operation to perform unobtrusively.